Tonguing — where and where not expected

[stringbed]

The characteristic ornamentation style of the uilleann pipes has significantly influenced current practice on the flute and tin whistle. For example, constraints are placed on the use of tonguing which is otherwise a core expressive device on woodwinds blown directly by mouth. Inversely, the failure to understand the ITM idiom is often personified by a tin whistle player punching out every note in a tune individually as a naïve recorder player might.

In deeper historical perspective, tonguing has shrunk from being an almost prosodic woodwind technique using an elaborate system of syllables, to simple articulation. Tonguing syllables were still in their heyday in 1672, when they appeared in a treatise on bellows-blown bagpipes to describe what was to become a design consideration with the uilleann pipes. Prior to their advent, traditional Irish dance tunes were played on other wind instruments, leaving a question about how extensively tonguing syllables may have figured in period performance.

This is discussed in detail here.

[Mr.Gumby]

Closing the end of the chanter on uilleann pipes provides the same basic capability but it is mainly used to add staccato articulation to the extensive array of other decorative devices, as heard above in the ten-year-older recording by Patsy Touhey.

Hm, I would suggest a close listening would reveal there's a bit more to non legato piping than merely bippity triplets.

[stringbed]

Hm, I would suggest a close listening would reveal there's a bit more to non legato piping than merely bippity triplets.

I wasn’t making any such bippity suggestion. I was calling attention to the enhancement of the decorative devices on uilleann pipes with staccato, in contrast to its predominance on the NSP. Thanks for calling my attention to the imprecise wording, which has now been given a clarifying tweak.

[Mr.Gumby]

I wasn’t making any such bippity suggestion

Well, it was hard to read otherwise, especially when linking to a Touhey recording where the main staccato decorative devices are bcb aca and gfe triplets. Which, as it happens, is a far less extensive array than what he used in some of his more intricate pieces.

But my point is ofcourse that in non legato playing chanter stopping has a far wider , and more subtle, use than just staccato decoration. It does a lot of work, more than you seemed to give it credit for.

As an aside, a few days ago I heard two young men channel Mike Carney and James Morrison's 78 rpm recording of Pol ha'penny/Fisher's. Now that was a great display of staccato ornaments and a jawdropping delight to witness. And not something I'd even remotely expect (or want) to hear replicated on the whistle.

[Mr.Gumby]

This piece would benefit greatly from a more thorough examination of historical styles of traditional whistle playing. While there is not a huge number of historical recordings, compared to some other instruments, dating before, say, the 1940s, they do exist, and they paint a picture of sorts of way the instrument was played. I feel too much is assumed here based on modern approaches to the whistle.

[stringbed]

I really appreciate the attention you’re paying to this but it’s just a blog post (already a tad longer than most others on the same venue), not a draft article. It’s deliberately focused on one very narrow facet of an ever so much broader topic that, as you so rightly point out, demands more extensive and academically rigorous examination. If there are substantive errors in the blog post within its scope, I’ll gladly rectify them. I’m less certain how to deal with the suggestion that it might be somehow deficient because it doesn’t say what it was never intended to.

[Mr.Gumby]

I’m less certain how to deal with the suggestion that it might be somehow deficient because it doesn’t say what it was never intended to.

Perhaps the title of this thread 'Tonguing- where and where not expected' raised expectations of what the blog would be dealing with. And as such my expectation would be this would involve at least some sort of a look at various traditional styles that, when examined, would show a variety of approaches on where to expect tonguing to articulate the player's sense of a tune. I suppose I felt let down in that respect by what was on offer. It's an interesting subject that deserves more.

I'll leave it at that.

[stringbed]

Perhaps the title of this thread ‘Tonguing- where and where not expected’ raised expectations of what the blog would be dealing with.

There is a two-paragraph abstract between that title and the link, intended to key such expectations. I would have thought that it clearly enough indicates a 17th-century focus. (If the abstract reads as gobbledygook why click at all?)

It’s an interesting subject that deserves more.

This is the third blog post in a row about the historical development of ornamentation that I’ve provided links to on C&F (starting here). Again, I would have thought that to indicate a more extensive effort. Nor have I signaled any intention of wrapping it up with the present installment.

You’ve listed five shortcomings with it alone in our current exchange. I’m guessing that you haven’t been thrilled with the other posts, either, assuming they’ve caught your eye. Perhaps you should simply ignore any future not-this-guy-again links.

I’ll leave it at that.

Agreed. (If there’s some deeper problem here let’s take its discussion offline.)

[paddler]

The characteristic ornamentation style of the uilleann pipes has significantly influenced current practice on the flute and tin whistle.

Well, I agree with this sentence.

For example, constraints are placed on the use of tonguing which is otherwise a core expressive device on woodwinds blown directly by mouth.

I think this is somewhere between misleading and incorrect, depending on which instruments you are talking about. For example, with tin whistle playing, tonguing is still very heavily used, as evidenced quite explicitly throughout Mary Begrin's tutorial series. Tonguing is not the only ornamentation style she uses, but she still uses it very extensively throughout every tune. The decision to use alternate ornaments in various places is driven by the desire to achieve subtly different musical effects, in the context of the chosen tune and phrasing.

Flute player Conal O'Grada has a nice discussion of this in his tutorial book. He discussed the relative strength of various types of ornament that could potentially be used, and how different choices can be applied in different contexts. The effect of certain ornamentation techniques, including tonging, on the flute is subtly different to the whistle, so while O'Grada's use of tonguing will differ greatly to Bergin's use of tonguing, there is still much commonality between them regarding which notes to emphasis or articulate, and the relative strengths of effect that they consider desirable in different places. And with how these choices integrate with phrasing and breath points.

Tonguing does not occur on Uilleann pipes, for obvious reasons, so pipers have, out of necessity, been forced to explore a wide range of alternate strategies for distinguishing and emphasizing notes. This has lead to a rich variety of approaches to select from. Almost all of these have the potential to cross over to the flute and whistle, and where they have added something deemed valuable they have done so, giving flute and whistle players a richer set of choices to select from when deciding how to express their musical intent. Most of the choices are not, and never have been, captured in written representations of the music, but that is not because they didn't exist.

Inversely, the failure to understand the ITM idiom is often personified by a tin whistle player punching out every note in a tune individually as a naïve recorder player might.

Of course, if you place equal emphasis on all notes, either articulating them all or none of them, that is just wrong, and does indicate a failure to understand the music. That is not an issue of tonguing being a wrong articulation technique per se.

In deeper historical perspective, tonguing has shrunk from being an almost prosodic woodwind technique using an elaborate system of syllables, to simple articulation.

I don't think this is true in practice. There always were, and still are, many ways to articulate notes using all stages of the vocal tract. Players, even today, use a very wide range of techniques to achieve the effects they want, and styles differ among players. There is nothing simple about it today, and I suspect that, if anything, the range of options has grown over time as people have tried to emulate the style of others.

Tonguing syllables were still in their heyday in 1672, when they appeared in a treatise on bellows-blown bagpipes to describe what was to become a design consideration with the uilleann pipes. Prior to their advent, traditional Irish dance tunes were played on other wind instruments, leaving a question about how extensively tonguing syllables may have figured in period performance.

This is discussed in detail here.

I think the question you finish with here is really more about how music was represented in written notation over history. This has never really been that relevant in the context of the oral tradition of Irish traditional music, where there is a very rich diversity of techniques, most of which have rarely, if ever, really been notated in a formalized way. Some of the more recent tutorials, such as Grey Larsen's "The Essential Guide to the Irish Flute and Whistle" have attempted to define notational standards for addressing this, and while these are quite rich, they tend to immediately run into the problem that the range of techniques used in practice, and the diversity of styles, both personal and regional, is so rich that they are criticized as appearing too rigid or restrictive, even if that was not their original intent.

I agree that this is an interesting subject that deserves much more study. And I should add that I do agree with most of what you said in the article.

[stringbed]

There always were, and still are, many ways to articulate notes using all stages of the vocal tract. Players, even today, use a very wide range of techniques to achieve the effects they want, and styles differ among players.

I would be very surprised to learn that present-day wind players use the wide range of differentiated tonguing syllables found in instruction manuals from the mid-16th through mid-18th centuries, without regarding this as a period technique. Bruce Haynes gives a good review of the origin, decline, and legacy of the earlier practice in an article from 1997, titled Tu ru or not Tu ru: Paired Syllables and Unequal Tonguing Patterns on Woodwinds in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.

My blog post was triggered by a reference to tonguing syllables in a French treatise on the musette, from 1672. The tie between such syllables and performance on a bellows-blown bagpipe becomes more obvious in a performance such as the one here. The expression is carried by perceived interruptions of the airflow with no ornamentation beyond a few cadential trills and some finger vibrato. (There are links to different video demos in the blog.)

A modification to the chanter attested before the end of the same century in England permitted true silenced articulation. This remains a primary mode of expression on the Northumbrian smallpipe as heard here. The enabling device has a direct parallel on the uilleann pipes but its use is integrated into a more varied decorative idiom.

Tonguing does not occur on Uilleann pipes, for obvious reasons, so pipers have, out of necessity, been forced to explore a wide range of alternate strategies for distinguishing and emphasizing notes.

If we substitute articulation controlled by airflow for tonguing, we’re at the heart of the matter. It certainly seems as though it found its way into the expressive repertoire of the uilleann pipes via older direct-blown woodwinds. The intriguing question remains about why other types of bagpipes with the same capability clearly prioritize it over finger-based articulation. Regional and personal preferences obviously weigh heavily into its answer.

Your references to Mary Bergin and Conal O’Grada are particularly apt when the same issue is approached from the flute and whistle perspective. Josie McDermott, who made effective use of varied tongued articulation on the latter (as here), also discussed Bergin and O’Grada in a general commentary on ornamentation. Another relevant question is whether he regarded tonguing as an integral facet of ornamentation or as an adjunct to it.

[paddler]

I would be very surprised to learn that present-day wind players use the wide range of differentiated tonguing syllables found in instruction manuals from the mid-16th through mid-18th centuries, without regarding this as a period technique.

But I think it is the case that present-day wind players use a wide range of differentiated tonguing syllables. My own experience with learning to play the Boehm flute as a child was filled with lots of exercises blowing notes with vocal tract articulations that emphasized the use of different parts of the vocal tract. For example, using the lips "puh" and "buh", using the front of the tongue "tuh" and "duh", using the back of the tongue "kuh" and "guh", and using the throat "huh". A quick internet search shows that this is still common/standard practice for Boehm flute players learning basic articulation.

Decades later when I started learning to play Irish music, this early training as a child kind of got in the way of me learning other forms of articulation because my natural tendency was to try to get the sounds I wanted using the above techniques, which came very easily to me given my background, but which never quite worked. One way to get around this problem was to try to force myself to play without any kind of vocal tract articulation and just use finger articulations. This was a hard training exercise for me. But as I got more experience in the genre I learned that Irish flute players do use a broad range of vocal tract articulation techniques, including very widespread use of air flow manipulation in the lower parts of the vocal tract, ranging between glottal stops and breath pulsing from the diaphragm. In my opinion, all of the above are related, in that they are articulations made by manipulating the airstream before it enters the flute. A classical flute player is more inclined to refer to them all as "tonguing" and an Irish flute player is more likely to refer to them as something other than tonguing, but they are all really quite distinct from finger-based articulations that are central to piping.

As I've become more experienced with finger-based articulations I have learned that there is an extraordinarily broad spectrum of different approaches for different musical contexts on a given instrument. Just as "tonguing" is not a single ornamentation technique, neither is "the Irish roll". There are lots of different kinds of rolls and lots of roll-like things that are generally not referred to as rolls. The range of techniques and the way they are played, varies from instrument to instrument.

Tonguing does not occur on Uilleann pipes, for obvious reasons, so pipers have, out of necessity, been forced to explore a wide range of alternate strategies for distinguishing and emphasizing notes.

If we substitute articulation controlled by airflow for tonguing, we’re at the heart of the matter. It certainly seems as though it found its way into the expressive repertoire of the uilleann pipes via older direct-blown woodwinds. The intriguing question remains about why other types of bagpipes with the same capability clearly prioritize it over finger-based articulation. Regional and personal preferences obviously weigh heavily into its answer.

Indeed! And even within Uilleann piping, there is a range of open and closed fingering techniques and styles that influence the sound. There are clearly influences from one instrument to another, instrument design has evolved based on musical needs and preferences, and the music has evolved with the evolution of the instruments.

[paddler]

The other thing I intended to say, but forgot, was that my interpretation of the meaning of the "tonguing symbols" used in tutorials or written sheet music, past or present, is not so much a reference to an articulation on a wind instrument, but rather a description of the intended sound in terms of human vocalizations. These are the building blocks of human language and hence serve as obvious reference points for describing and distinguishing among subtly different sound effects.

When describing the difference between the sounds produced by two different techniques on a bagpipe, one might say that one sounds more like "huh" whereas the other is more like "tuh". In this context, I think the symbols are just a reference to human (western European) vocalizations and are not derived from tonguing on flute or whistle. In fact, I'd say it is most likely that the same symbols are also used to convey to flute and whistle players the kind of sound effect that is desired, again using human voice as the reference. So one might say that the human voice influenced flute and whistle playing, and also influence the playing of other instruments, including the bagpipes. But the existence of written representations of consonant human language sounds in a tutorial or musical score does not necessarily imply an influence from flute or whistle playing to piping. I'm not arguing that there wasn't one. I'm just saying that this kind of written symbolism doesn't seem like definitive proof of one.

[stringbed]

…my interpretation of the meaning of the “tonguing symbols” used in tutorials or written sheet music, past or present, is not so much a reference to an articulation on a wind instrument, but rather a description of the intended sound in terms of human vocalizations.

Tutorial texts through the mid-1700s generally explain quite clearly that the syllables describe the movement of the tongue while the instrument is being played. The oral tuition of the corresponding technique would obviously involve vocalizing those syllables. Since pronounceability is a property of a syllable by definition, that wouldn’t have been a problem.

Conversely, it’s plausible if not likely, that tonguing syllables were first used in verbal contexts and only later committed to paper. Their notation was phonemically rather than lexically based but wasn’t a symbolic representation in any sense of that term I’ve ever encountered in musicological analysis. Such things as staccato signs first turn up as ornaments and only gradually came to be conceptualized as articulation marks. (They weren’t used on a level of detail corresponding to tonguing syllables, so alternately referring to them as symbols is moot in any case.)

When describing the difference between the sounds produced by two different techniques on a bagpipe, one might say that one sounds more like “huh” whereas the other is more like “tuh”.

The “Ta” and “Ha” in the 1672 treatise on the musette are not used to describe techniques but rather the difference in the onset of a note on the long and short chanters. This was during the heyday of tonguing syllables and the intended readership would doubtless have been familiar with them. Ta and Ha were among those commonly employed and I can’t see any reason for positing that they were coincidentally chosen for some external reason.

Mary Bergin uses the same syllables 340 years later and ascribes the same basic semantics to them, in her Irish Tin Whistle Tutorial:

“The basic pattern I use is to tongue the two ‘short notes’…by saying the words ‘HAH-TA-TAH.’ The ‘HAH’ is the first note and is not tongued and the shorter second and third notes — ‘TA-TAH’ — are tongued.”

She relates this to the playing position of the tongue in a recorded demonstration (excerpted in the blog post).

[paddler]

When describing the difference between the sounds produced by two different techniques on a bagpipe, one might say that one sounds more like “huh” whereas the other is more like “tuh”.

The “Ta” and “Ha” in the 1672 treatise on the musette are not used to describe techniques but rather the difference in the onset of a note on the long and short chanters. This was during the heyday of tonguing syllables and the intended readership would doubtless have been familiar with them. Ta and Ha were among those commonly employed and I can’t see any reason for positing that they were coincidentally chosen for some external reason.

Mary Bergin uses the same syllables 340 years later and ascribes the same basic semantics to them, in her Irish Tin Whistle Tutorial:

“The basic pattern I use is to tongue the two ‘short notes’…by saying the words ‘HAH-TA-TAH.’ The ‘HAH’ is the first note and is not tongued and the shorter second and third notes — ‘TA-TAH’ — are tongued.”

She relates this to the playing position of the tongue in a recorded demonstration (excerpted in the blog post).

Right, but you can hardly claim that the use of the symbols in the context of the bagpipe chanters relates to the playing position of the tongue there. To imply that it must be referring to the sound of some woodwind instrument rather than directly to the human vocalizations themselves, seems like a bit of a stretch, especially when the use of such terms in tuition for woodwinds explicitly relates them to vocalizations. If we saw such usage in the context of guiding a singer, it would seem strange to claim that a term such as Ta was referring to the sound made by a whistle when tongued, rather than simply referring directly to the vocalization, for example.

I don't doubt that such terminology was used extensively in the past, as it is in the present, to refer to vocal tract based articulations when playing wind instruments. As a life long wind instrument player that is consistent with all of my experience and reading. But it is also used extensively in the context of speech, and I think that came first. And even today when people teach basic wind instrument articulation, they do so by relating it to elements of speech. But I think we are going down a rat hole here discussing the minutia of something that seems mostly concerned with the meaning and origins of notation for written representations of music, a topic that is only very marginally relevant to the focus of this forum, given that Irish Traditional Music is predominantly an oral tradition, and employs a range of articulation techniques that is far wider and richer than any music notation that I have ever seen.